The Amateurs (7 page)

His sons were made constantly aware that Bouscarens did not waste their gifts. The oldest of the three, Tony, had played lightweight football at Penn, and Mike, the middle brother, had been a great football player at Yale in the late 1960s, an All-Ivy League linebacker. Mike Bouscaren, even by the standards of the Ivy League, was not particularly big, six-one and 195 pounds, but he was a quick and almost violent tackier. Mike was eleven years older than Joe, and Mike's achievements were the focus of family life when Joe was approaching adolescence. Joe sensed his father's immense pride in Mike when he talked to friends; Joe had a sense as he grew older that his father was in some way living through Mike's athletic achievements. Those had been great Yale teams: Calvin Hill and Brian Dowling (who inspired Doonesbury, the comic strip) had played on them. The Bouscaren family had driven down to all the games, and hearing his brother introduced to the cheers of sixty thousand people in Yale Bowl had been heady stuff for a ten-year-old boy. What Mike had done
meant
something in that house, and the desire to emulate those achievements was an important part of Joe's boyhood. He was very much Mike's brother as a boy, he liked the sense of shared achievement and shared pride. But he was also, he knew later, in the shadow of his brother.

He had played football at prep school but had not enjoyed it. For a time tennis seemed likely to be his sport. When he entered Yale, he was about six-two and quite slim, the perfect build for a tennis player. But the illusion of tennis died quickly. He was at best a limited country-club player, and the people who would play for Yale had already been on the junior circuits. So finally he turned to crew. Early in the fall of his freshman year, his tennis career abruptly terminated, he had wandered over to the Yale boathouse and asked for help in learning how to row. Even then the intensity was exceptional. Tony Johnson, the Yale varsity coach, had a sense that this young man wanted to learn everything there was about rowing in the next ten or fifteen minutes so he could stop wasting time and get out on the water and
do
it.

Like Biglow, who arrived a year later, Bouscaren became a critical part of the group that helped regenerate Yale rowing. Old-time Yalies were inclined to blame the decline on the radicalization of the campus during the Vietnam War; but Harry Parker's Harvard crews had been magnificent in those same years, they had worn their hair long, identified themselves with antiwar protest groups, written their senior theses on black power and gone to the Olympics. Indeed, Parker had taken a special pride in the intensity of the political commitment of his athletes. Joe Bouscaren, so competitive himself, thought Yale rowing remarkably uncompetitive. The strength of Harvard's crews came from the constant challenge from the third- and second-boat heavies, which were almost as good as the varsity. At Yale the oarsmen appeared content to wait their turn. A sophomore was not supposed to drive a senior out of the varsity boat. We'll row, the varsity oarsmen seemed to be saying, we'll be genteel with each other and will not be abrasive. Bouscaren by those standards
was
abrasive. Years later, Tony Johnson remembered that in Bouscaren's sophomore year he had taken two crews out on the river. Since it was early in the season, he had asked the new sophomores to introduce themselves. Each had done so, the most modest kind of roll call, until it had been Bouscaren's turn and he had said, "I'm Joe Bouscaren, and I'm going to kick your ass."

What he loved about rowing was the knowledge that what he put into training he would always get back on the water. He did well from the start, he was a good student of the style and he quickly became a mechanically gifted oarsman. He had to be good mechanically, for unlike the others, he had nothing left over to waste. He became the stroke of the freshman heavyweight crew, a considerable achievement for someone who had never rowed before. He also began to build himself up. For the first time he had a sense he could become a varsity athlete at Yale, and that mattered. He loved rowing but hated the fact that as the smallest man on the 1978 and 1979 varsity his place was never as secure as it should have been. Though he had stroked the varsity as a sophomore, by his junior year, his size threatened to make him expendable. A lot of talented sophomores, Biglow and his classmates, were obviously going to row for the varsity, and Tony Johnson privately felt that someone a little bigger and stronger might replace Bouscaren in the first boat. That winter Johnson had driven his oarsmen with a series of unusually grueling indoor exercises; Bouscaren had done them along with all the others, but at the end, when the other oarsmen were barely able to stand up, he had done an additional twenty minutes of jumping rope to add to his conditioning. He would not be displaced. He saved his seat. A year later, the Yale boat was bigger and stronger than ever, and Bouscaren and Biglow were the two smallest men in it. Johnson, like most crew coaches, preferred his weight in the middle and his lighter men at the ends, one stroking, one at bow. For a time Bouscaren stroked. Then Johnson tried Biglow at stroke. Bouscaren took it very hard, and there was some dissident muttering from him. Finally one of the other oarsmen went to Johnson and said that something had to be done about Joe, that his unhappiness was poisoning the atmosphere. Johnson called him aside and, with an implied threat in his words, told him that his complaining had to end. The muttering stopped. He didn't like it, but he had still made the first boat.

He had graduated from Yale in 1979. While many of his teammates had tried out for and made the national team that year, he had pulled back from rowing. His new world was medical school. He still cared about keeping in shape, and he bought a machine that simulated cross-country skiing. But after a year away from rowing he was surprised how much he missed it. He had thought of sculling. Mike Vespoli, who had replaced Buzz Congram as the freshman coach at Yale and who knew how to motivate Bouscaren, had stood with him once at the Eastern Sprints. When the subject of sculling came up, Vespoli, who wanted Bouscaren to try it, said, as casually as he could, "I don't think you can do that, Joe. It's too hard, and you have to find too much within yourself. I don't think you can push yourself hard enough." It was, he knew, the perfect way of lighting a fire in Bouscaren. (Four years later, right after Biglow had beaten both Bouscaren and Wood on the Easter Sunday race in Cambridge, Vespoli, still wanting to motivate Bouscaren, had said to Biglow, in Bouscaren's presence, "John, how did it feel to row right through Joe? It must have felt really good.")

In the summer of 1980, Bouscaren, home from Cornell Medical School, had started working out in Syracuse with Scott Roop, a champion lightweight sculler. He and Roop went out together almost every day, and Roop would give Bouscaren quite generous leads and then row right through him. But Roop, who was training hard, pulled Bouscaren up to his level; the latter became more serious about the sport and about working on the Nautilus machines. His brother Mike thought that for Joe there was the appeal of a sport in which the athlete worked things out for himself and practiced by himself. To Mike, it fit the way his younger brother had grown up. Their mother had died of cancer at the age of forty-six when both older brothers were already out of the house, and Joe had become a single child living with a single parent. He had been forced to develop a sense of self-dependence that most people learn only much later in their lives. He was, Mike Bouscaren believed, accustomed to finding his sources of strength from within. Nothing could be better preparation for a sculler. When he returned to Cornell Medical School after that summer, he decided to keep up his sculling. He would drive to New Haven on the weekends, sleep in the deserted Yale boathouse and take out a scull for as many hours as he could, balancing the intense mental and psychological exertion of medical school with the physical exertion of rowing.

He came gradually to love sculling. He had always wanted to stroke because the stroke stood apart in a boat. In sculling every quality oarsman stood apart. He was no longer the slim little bow oar who was carried by the heavier guys in the crew. By 1981, he was spending more and more time in Cambridge so he could work out with the other top scullers under the eye of Harry Parker. Bouscaren was intrigued by the contrast between his Yale coach, Tony Johnson, and Parker. Johnson, a gentler and more reachable man, pushed his oarsmen as hard as Parker did physically but not as hard mentally. With Tony, he thought, if you were putting out a genuine effort, there was almost always some kind of verbal reward. But with Harry, whatever you did was never enough. The question that seemed to hang in the atmosphere of the Harvard boathouse, unstated but always there, Bouscaren thought, was: Are you really tough enough for this? The Harvard environment, he decided, was a colder one. If he never became entirely accustomed to it, it did push him to reach for still higher levels of excellence. His brother Mike, whom he had once admired so much, now admired him. Joe, he thought, had maximized both his physical and his mental abilities to an uncommon degree, thus permitting himself to compete against much bigger, stronger, more naturally gifted men. He had managed that not just because he understood the sport and his own abilities so completely but also because he understood the concept of relativity in competition. Joe did not go into an event hoping to set a record or to dominate others. Rather he shrewdly assessed his own strengths and limits as well as those of his main competitors and adjusted his race plans accordingly. (Tiff Wood tended to confirm Mike Bouscaren's judgment. Wood liked to row against Biglow because Biglow's races were so consistent. But he did not like to race against Bouscaren because the latter rowed a different race each time). To Mike Bouscaren, his younger brother had become an athlete of almost unbelievable mental toughness. He had no business competing in this world, and yet he was competing at the highest level. In 1983 the quality of his rowing had begun steadily improving, and there was a marked improvement in his endurance. In the last year Bouscaren had won three important races in which endurance was critical, the Head of the Schuylkill (2.75 miles), the Head of the Connecticut (3.5 miles) and the most prestigious of them, the Head of the Charles (three miles), where he had, to his absolute delight, edged out Tiff Wood. By all rights he should have been preparing himself for a team boat where his technical skill was badly needed. But he wanted to be the single sculler, and he was sure he was peaking just in time for the Olympics. In the early spring Mike Vespoli, who was helping the rowing association by checking on the sculling program, had called Bouscaren to find out how things were going. "Is there anything we could be doing that would make things better?" Vespoli asked.

"Well, there could be a lot more work on the quad," Bouscaren answered. The year before, he had rowed on the national quad, which had taken seventh in the world. Rowing with him had been Charley Altekruse, Bill Purdy and Biglow. There was the possibility that with more experience it might become a more competitive boat.

"Oh," said Vespoli, knowing exactly what he was doing, "are you willing to give up the single and row in the quad?"

"Absolutely not," said Bouscaren.

CHAPTER

SIX

As Tiff Wood walked among the other young businessmen in Boston, he appeared to be just another modest young man in Ivy League clothes, the actuarial expert with a consulting firm that he in fact was. Despite his six-one height and his 185 pounds, he did not look tall and powerful as one might imagine a great oar. In his street clothes, he seemed almost slight of build. But there was no fat on him, he was all muscle. If the normal human body fat was somewhere around 18 percent, his level of fat varied between 7 and 8.5 percent (skater Eric Heiden's was 7 percent). Only in his rowing clothes did the power in his body show his enormously strong arms and his immensely thick and awesomely muscled legs. The power in them was unmistakable; and when John Biglow spoke of Tiff Wood and his ability, he spoke first of his legs. Tiff Wood, in classic terms of muscularity, was much stronger than John Biglow.

In addition to his strength, Wood had an exceptional capacity to bear pain. Rowing, particularly single sculling, inflicts on the individual in every race a level of pain associated with few other sports. There was certainly pain in football during a head-on collision, pain in other sports on the occasion of a serious injury. That was more the threat of pain; in rowing there was the absolute guarantee of it every time. Pain in championship single-scull rowing is a given. Each race is like a sprint. But unlike a sprint, which usually lasts 10 or 20 or 45 seconds, a two-thousand-meter sculling championship lasts 7 minutes and is roughly the length of a two-mile run. The body quickly burns out its normal supplies of oxygen and then demands more. But less and less oxygen is available. That means the body is still producing high levels of energy, but it is making the sculler pay for it by producing a great deal of lactic acid as well. With the lactic acid comes greater and greater pain. In addition, the scullers are unable to pace themselves, as long-distance runners can. They might try to hold back a little bit of energy so they will not burn out at the end, but in truth they go all out from the very beginning. It is an advantage to lead in a sculling race; the leader can see the other boats behind him and does not get caught in their wash.

When a race was over and Tiff Wood had rowed at his peak, it took almost five days before his body was physically replenished. When he thought of rowing, the first thing that came to mind was pain. After the first twenty-five strokes of a race, his body ached. His lungs and his legs seemed to scream at him to stop. On occasion the temptation was almost irresistible. The ability to resist the impulse, to keep going in spite of it, to reach through it and summon extra resources of power while others, stronger and smoother of technique, were fading, made him a champion. But he could not think of racing without thinking of the pain. It was hard for him in advance of a race to sit and plan out what he intended to do because the very thought of racing filled him with dread of the pain.